Is AI really intelligent? What is artificial intelligence, types, trends, risks of AI

Author: Jozef Wagner

Digitization

07. 06. 2024 16 reading minutes

Nowadays, many people are starting to fear that artificial intelligence AI will take their job in the future. In more sci-fi imaginations, some people are thinking, that artificial AI is a threat to humanity and are afraid AI will take over the world and wipe us out. These fantasies are fuelled by many books and films, but in reality it is good pratice to first analyse what artificial intelligence actually is and what it can actually do.

AI has become a trend in recent years and we are encountering it more and more often (think of various virtual assistants and autonomous cars, for example). AI is changing the way we communicate, work, live and use technology. Along with this, there is a growing concern about how much of an impact this will have on us or the world we live in.

Many media contribute to these fears and following the example of various science fiction works, portray electronic artificial intelligence as a thinking being that is capable of solving complex problems and making decisions for us. Some will go even further and start scaring people that they may lose their jobs. However, this should not be the case for those who see an opportunity in AI and focus on what it can offer them instead of the threats which comes from it. They will begin to interact with it and use it at work, making them more efficient. It went smilarly with the invention of the calculator or the computer. In addition, those who have already started using AI have often been surprised that it sometimes does not understand what they want it to do. So they will find out that the work they wanted to delegate to AI, they will have to do themselves and it will be done much faster and better. AI is likely to improve over the years, but it is still a tool with limited capabilities.

On the other hand, there are various tendencies to regulate artificial intelligence. It’s coming mainly from companies that have neglected development and now are trying to hold others back. So they often come up with nonsensical arguments like AI is dangerous and needs to be banned or strictly regulated. But their real goal is to ride on the wave of this trend. A similar scenario has been repeated many times in history, most recently with Bitcoin (BTC).

In today’s world, it is therefore very important to be able to think critically, to seek out experts and to evaluate information consistently. Even with AI topics, we are increasingly starting to see fabrications, sensationalism and the suppression of the facts that are less popular but true. So let’s take a look together at what AI actually is, what it can offer us, and whether it’s actually as intelligent as it claims to be.

Artificial intelligence history

The origin of artificial intelligence date back several decades, when the term artificial intelligence appeared in a proposal for an academic conference held at Dartmouth College in 1956. The pioneers of modern artificial intelligence range from the famous British World War II code decrypting mathematician Alan Turing to the inventors of the revolutionary transformer neural network architecture, who have made significant advances in natural language processing.

However, the idea that the human brain can be mechanized is as old as civilization itself. Many ancient cultures built statues similar to humans, believed to have intelligence and emotion. Myths and legends are full of statues that come to life.

As early as the first millennium BC, philosophers such as Aristotle began to engage in methods of formal thinking, the knowledge of which was built upon by mathematicians, engineers and theologians for the next two thousand years or more. Many prominent figures in the past have tried to describe human thought as symbols, which formed the basis of the AI work of today’s computer scientists, psychologists, neurobiologists, economists, and others.

Artificial intelligence meaning and how it works

What characterises intelligence, especially in the context of the job description, is not easy to determine. The definition of intelligence is generally the ability to acquire knowledge and apply it to achieve a result. The actions taken are dependent on the situation and are not performed from memory. The behaviour of a machine in this way is generally considered to be artificial intelligence. At a basic level, AI programming focuses on three cognitive skills:

• Learning
  Involves mining data and creating rules called algorithms to turn data into actionable information in AI applications.
• Reasoning
  is the process of drawing logical conclusions from given information and gives AI the ability to choose the most appropriate algorithm in a particular context from the set of algorithms available.
• Self-correction
  Allows AI to gradually learn from mistakes and adapt until it reaches the desired goal.

Artificial intelligence types based on capabilities

Narrow AI, Weak AI, narrow AI
Most current AI systems, including those that can play complex games such as chess and Go, fall into this category. This type of AI is designed to perform a specific, narrowly focused task (e.g. facial recognition, internet search or driving a car). They operate in a limited, predefined range or set of contexts.

General AI, General AI, Strong AI
It is currently nothing more than a theoretical concept. This AI can use prior knowledge and skills to accomplish new tasks in a different context without humans having to train it on new models. This ability allows it to learn and perform any intellectual task that a human can.

Superintelligent AI (Superintelligent AI)
It represents a future hypothetical form of AI in which it would reason, learn, judge, and have cognitive abilities that exceed those of humans. Applications possessing superintelligent AI capabilities go beyond understanding human feelings and experiences to feel emotions, have needs and achieve their beliefs and desires.

Artificial intelligence types based on features

Reactive AI
It can process huge amount of data and produce seemingly intelligent output, but is unable to analyze scenarios that contain incomplete information or require an understanding of historical context. These AI systems do not store memories or past experiences for future actions. A good example is IBM’s Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov at chess.

Limited memory AI
Systems with limited memory can make better, more informed decisions based on the analysis of the historical data they have collected. This type of AI can playfully handle complex classification tasks and use past data to make predictions. Most current AI applications, from AI chatbots and virtual assistants to autonomous cars, fall into this category.

Theory of mind
This is a more advanced type of AI that researchers are still working on. This type of AI would be able to understand human motives, thinking, emotions, beliefs, needs, make decisions based on these and offer personalised outcomes. This form of intelligence requires the machine that actually understand humans.

Self-aware AI
It represents the music of the future, we could only talk about such AI when machines have their own consciousness, perception and self-awareness, they will be able to not only understand emotions, but also to express them, which could then lead to the formation of beliefs and desires.

AI impact on business

The importance and strategic value of AI for business in the 21st century is compared to electricity at the beginning of 20th century. Without AI, companies won’t be able to use the huge potential of their data stores to capitalise on a major commodity of the 21st century, which is electronic data. AI is applied in many forms: machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing, computer vision, automation, robotics – these are all areas of AI that can give companies a competitive advantage.

The ability of AI to make meaningful predictions requires not only huge amounts of data, but also that the data would be of high quality. The development of the cloud environment as a scalable and flexible architecture has helped the massive development of AI by providing it with the necessary computing power to process such a large amount of data.

Perhaps the biggest and most significant impact of AI on business is its ability to not only automate and take over the work done by humans, but to increase productivity many times over by deploying computing resources to reduce overall time. In addition, AI will no longer simply automate tasks, but will look for the most efficient way to complete them using the available data to optimize workflows.

AI trends in different industries

Currently, most companies are trying to use AI to optimize their existing business processes, but are still cautious about completely overhauling their business models to make the most of AI’s potential. In the meantime, artificial intelligence is making its way into marketing, financial services, agriculture and industry, healthcare, schools, HR and many other sectors.

Artificial intelligence is already reliably doing work in many areas that used to be done by humans. Whether it’s assisting doctors with diagnoses, working in call centres and in tech support, AI can often resolve people’s queries and complaints faster and more efficiently. In security, AI is applied to cybersecurity threats detection and prioritizes those that require human attention. Banks use AI to monitor transactions in real time, to speed up and support loan processing and ensure compliance.

In industry, it helps speed up the creation of new products by reducing the time between design, production and product launch. AI helps to reduce errors and increase the quality of the followed standards. It helps to streamline the recruitment process and verifying of candidates, eliminating bias. Overall, it helps organisations to expand their business models and find ways to improve their business processes.

AI future job offers

The fact, that many jobs have already started to be replaced by artificial intelligence and that this will only accelerate in the future is already evident today. Progress simply cannot be stopped and companies will want to significantly increase productivity in order to achieve better economic results and that is exactly what artificial intelligence offers them. Overall, jobs that process data are particularly at risk, as AI is incomparably faster and more efficient at this.

In the future, companies will invest in clouds rather than data analysts. Also, tens of thousands of jobs across government are at risk because most people in offices communicate via email and work in Word and Excel. However, it remains an open question when the AI trend will come to Slovakia and whether there will be the political will to change something.

The job positions that AI will not be able to replace for a long time are those where there is a lot of communication and incomplete tasks to work with or there is lower quality data. This includes almost all IT job offers. Nowadays, AI can code something (e.g. Github Copilot), but most of the time it’s not what we wanted, because often the generated code cannot even be compiled.

For example, Java developer and IT tester from msg life and other software companies won’t have to worry about losing their jobs for a long time to come. In addition, according to Gartner analyst company, there will be many new jobs related to the advent of AI in the near future (by 2026), and the number of jobs created and lost will be roughly equal.

Artificial intelligence risks

One of the biggest risks to the effective use of AI in the corporate sphere is mistrust. Many employees fear and distrust AI or are not convinced of its value in the workplace. Without increased confidence in AI in workers, it may not be possible to achieve all the business benefits that AI could bring. But there are other risks that businesses need to be aware of.

Errors
AI can eliminate human errors, but poor quality data, incorrect training data, or errors in algorithms can lead to AI errors, and these errors can stack up dangerously due to the large volume of transactions that AI systems typically process.

Transparency
Since AI makes decisions based on its mathematical models, sometimes it may not be obvious why AI made the decisions it did in a given situation.

Ethics and bias
Companies are responsible for the AI they use and therefore they must protect themselves from unethical AI bias and must be wary of the unintended consequences of using AI to make business decisions.

Loss of Human Skills
The extension of AI could disrupt and degrade skills of workers and should raise questions about which key skills and capabilities businesses want to retain in their human workforce.

Cybersecurity concerns
Hackers can use AI to create more sophisticated and successful attacks. (Read the article AI and Password Security: AI can steal your passwords.)

AI hallucinations
This includes AI systems deceiving users, sometimes giving false information or simply making things up. These are mainly generative AI chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT).

The illusion of intelligence and artificial intelligence disadvantages

We can all agree on the fact that artificial intelligence is artificial, meaning it is not live but created by human beings. The question is whether it is also intelligent? This has long been debated. AI is created by intelligent humans, but that doesn’t mean that AI is intelligent. At its core, it’s still a set of algorithms and instructions to perform specific tasks. Humans decide what inputs and outputs the AI system will have and what different decisions it will be able to make based on the data.

This means that AI is not yet capable of independent thought and is essentially a very sophisticated mathematical model that follows the rules it was programmed to follow. For example, a system for identifying objects in pictures, it may be able to identify a rabbit in a picture, but it does not understand what the rabbit is or why it is important. It sticks to the boundaries that humans have programmed into it.

Similarly, AI is limited by the data it has been trained on. AI systems rely on large amounts of data to learn how to perform specific tasks, and the quality of that data can greatly affect the performance of the system. If we have trained the AI on a set of images that contains only white rabbits, it may not be able to accurately identify the brown rabbit. It’s because we haven’t taught AI about it yet. Therefore, a system trained on biased or incomplete data can be dangerous and give biased results.

Not the least reason why AI cannot be considered intelligent is that it lacks the ability to understand the nuances of human behaviour, to interpret and understand social situations, and to make decisions based on that. If someone smiles, the AI can use sensors in the robot to detect the smile, but it no longer understands what triggered it.

Yet, thanks to its advanced language processing models, AI already understands us and can also respond quite intelligently. This gives us that illusion of intelligence.

Conclusion

To think that artificial intelligence is intelligent is probably not fully true for now. Beneath the surface are sophisticated algorithms (with billions of parameters) to efficiently process quantum data, created by brilliant software developers. These algorithms have been thoroughly trained and are already capable of replacing some jobs.

However, humanity still cannot claim to have created artificial intelligence that can learn, think and understand emotions on its own (without human help). But that doesn’t mean we won’t create it in the future. We are still only at the beginning of the disruptive age of AI, and the tremendous advances in the field of AI in recent years suggest that the future in this area is going to be very interesting.

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Is AI really intelligent? What is artificial intelligence, types, trends, risks of AI

Jozef Wagner

I have been programming in Java for more than 10 years, currently I work at msg life Slovakia as a Java programmer senior and I help customers implement their requirements into the Life Factory insurance software. In my free time I like to relax in the forest or play a good computer game.